Donal Harris

I missed that. It wasn’t in bold type so I skipped right over it. 
 

How do you remove the O2, or is that not a problem?

Did it yesterday evening and not today. It is the WI cross I made a few days ago. Cut a little off each end of the vertical bar to make the proportions right and etched it. 
 

It still looks a lot like something a child would hand his mom to pin to the front of the fridge, but a little less than before. I may try heating it back up and driving the horizontal bar in toward the vertical bar. It would at least make the gaps on the back less visible. 
 

One thing I hadn’t considered when beginning this is the wire I wrapped it with would weld to the cross. You can see it on the back. 

If you weld all four sides, yes.  Welding just the ends solid isn’t that is it?

Never mind. I see the sides now. 

“Boomer Sooner!!!”

Julius Caesar 15 March 44 BC

1 hour ago, B4dWolf said:

Hi guys. Today i melted 11.3g of copper wire into a 10.1g copper coin. First forge second firing.

What scale do you use?  I need one, but can’t decide. 

I used to know a mnemonic for resistor color codes, but forgot it decades ago.  The only two memory aides I can think of at the moment are:

Eddie Ate Dynamite, Good Bye Eddie

Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless service, Honor, Integrity, Personal courage

On 3/12/2021 at 6:57 PM, jgrote said:

. But I come from a long line of gun toting drunk rednecks. I'm just trying to break the cycle.

Being a gun toting, drunk redneck is a bad thing?

Looks welded to me too. 

I believe all you needed to do is just get good tack welds. Welding the entire end was probably a bit more than necessary. 

2 hours ago, ThomasPowers said:

Billy; you want to keep the cork from drying out and shrinking and letting air in to turn the wine to vinegar.  It's a nice conceit to assume folks are drinking upscale wines with real corks instead of twist off caps...

You mean wine comes in bottles?

Probably would be, but if I worked at a little less glacial pace, this thread probably wouldn’t have strayed away from the primary topic as much. 
 

Thanks for finding that thread. Looks interesting. 

I’m not so sure it would be gouging. With less demand, their fixed costs have to be spread out over less coal. 

I went buy and purchased two 33 gallon drums of coal from the SE SCABA pile in Norman this afternoon. 15 cents a pound. $69.30 in total. The pile is not much of a pile anymore. 
 

Ball park. How much would it cost to have 25 - 28 tons shipped from Vinita to Norman?

I took one of the smaller pieces of WI I have and drew it out thin and narrow to make a cross. After cutting into two pieces, I used a small fuller to form a spot on each piece where they would be joined. (Not sure what the actual term for that is.) I made the slot too wide on the horizontal bar.

The bottom leg of the cross is a little long because I had thought I might fit it to a base. The top is long as well in case I decide to put an eye in it. 
 

I haven’t finished sanding the front. No matter what I do I expect when etched that weld line will show. The grain will also be going the wrong way. Even though it was a fairly tight fit on this side, the horizontal bar moved up and down into the vertical bar. That large rectangular depression is from the wire I had wrapped around the joint. Too deep to grind or file out without getting too thin. 
 

The back is still pretty rough, but I am ok with that. I am planning to cut out a copper or brass cross and rivet the WI cross to it and a wooden cross underneath both. 
 

As on the front, the vertical bar moved out into the horizontal bar, but the joint is even more obvious because of my having made the slot too big. 
 

The entire thing is not exactly off as far as straightness of lines go, but it is off just enough to give it a general appearance of a child having made it to give to his Mom to stick on the refrigerator. 
 

How can I fix it, or at least get the joints better next time?

6 hours ago, arkie said:

<snip> I could join Saltgrass in OK to get coal <snip>

 You must be hungry. Saltgrass is a chain of steak houses. Saltfork is the word you were looking for. The meetings may be far for you, but the NE Region’s coal pile may be even farther. I am not sure where the coal pile is located in the NE Region, but the SE Region’s pile is in Norman. Basically dead center of the state.

I have been wanting to try propane. This is giving me even more reason to make the switch. 

Someone in an earlier post said something about being being sure they would fail. 
 

This is my first, and so far, only attempt at making a pair of tongs. I think I had been forging for at most two weeks at the time. As you can see, I have a natural talent for blacksmithing. 

Or even built a home. 

Production in Oklahoma had been falling for the past few years. The bulk of sales has been to coal-fired power plants. Those have largely been replaced by natural gas power plants. 
 

I was born in Sallisaw. I went quail hunting with one of my uncles there a few times. The area he hunted most was a reclaimed strip mine. It wasn’t nearly the eyesore people seem to believe it would be. They actually put it back better than it had been before they removed the coal. 

It just wasn’t to be. SWMBO’s logic was stronger than mine. I really wanted Holland’s version of much the same more. Maybe they will come back in stock at some point. 

True. I could use one in the garage. One or two for my Dad’s shop when I am working there. Plus a portable one. 

Yes. Chisel barbs into the face, heat the body, drive it into the spikes, and then take both to a welding heat. EZ PZ. Or so Jennifer and the other pros on YouTube make it appear. 

I had trouble cutting in the barbs, or more specifically, getting them to stand up. When I try it this way in the future, I will first go back and look at the chisel Jennifer used a bit closer. 
 

And that helps, Thomas. Plus if they had had arc welders way back then, they would surely have used them. 

I see that is in Ft. Worth. Are you presenting or attending?

It is about three hours away. I’ve driven down to Ft. Worth just to play golf 10 or 12 times. Three or four times for clinical lab conferences. I think I will try to attend. It isn’t all that far.

I tried wrapping it with wire to hold it together, but it didn’t work. The wire is sort of thin. Probably just a little less than half as thick as baling wire. (Which may or may not be a reference that would be familiar to you.) It melted well before a welding temp was reached. That left me with non welded pieces and melted steel to get off the WI. 
 

Would stainless wire work better?  It shouldn’t fuse with the WI if it melts. 
 

What about trying a cleft weld to add the additional WI to the body?

If these next attempts fail, I will likely set it aside for a while and finish the punches and drifts I will need. Then practice welding some of the random bits of WI I have together. That and make a proper set of hammer tongs.

Getting a large chunk and a smaller piece both at a welding heat at the same time is difficult enough. Doing it AND getting them both in position on the anvil before they have cooled too much is even more so.

My post vise is a bit too tall for  use as a Hardy hole for long periods. Originally the leg was embedded in cement. I could mount it as it must have been, but then it would be too short for what I normally use it for. 

I need another one.  Obviously.

Weighed what was left. It was exactly 1 kg. I hammered out a piece of round bar to weld to one side for additional mass. It was 333 grams at the start. After 6 failed attempts to weld it to the original chunk, it is considerably less than 333 grams. 

Before giving up for the day, I tried wiring them together. Didn’t help. I will try again tomorrow evening. I may take them to work and ask Engineering to tack them together for me. I am hoping it won’t come to that because unless I get every trace of it ground off, it will show when etched. 

I should have noted her name as well as the name of the business. I believe she said something about equipment when she answered. I haven’t gone up yet. The club still has a little of the last load left, but will be needing more soon. I believe Byron told me we use 28 tons per year.

My problem is I do not have a truck which will safely haul a ton. My dad’s trucks are out of the question. His motor would blow up and I would never hear the end of it. I’ve hauled a half ton or so in my little Ranger, but a ton would surely have my front wheels off the ground. 

$225/ton in Vinita, Oklahoma. Mines are closed. They now buy coal from mines in Utah.  If they happen to have some they haven’t bagged, you can buy it less than a ton at a time.